Fashion and apparel style management poses several challenges for wearable item rental subscription services. For example, one such challenge involves traditional processes of assortment planning and buying decisions for clothing rental subscription services, which may be error prone and labor intensive. Another challenge is that subscribers to clothing rental subscription services need to look for styles they are willing to try out. Subscribers may look for styles using online search, recommendation, and collection browsing on style feature taxonomies. Subscribers often find it difficult to describe their constantly changing fashion preferences, and time consuming to discover interesting styles through service catalogs. Yet another challenge is that wearable item rental subscription services have to ensure that the wearable items offered through the clothing rental subscription services are always identified correctly in warehouses for circulating, cleaning, hanging, packing and shipping in the life cycles of the subscription service. It is not uncommon for a label and/or barcode associated with a wearable item to get lost when a user ships the wearable item back after wearing it or when it is cleaned in a warehouse. It is labor intensive to sort through a product catalog in order to match and find that particular wearable item in the system. This process sometimes fails because the process may be too time consuming. Therefore, the wearable item may be retired in the warehouse, causing an inventory loss.
Accordingly, there is a need for an approach utilizing visual recognition and image search to overcome some of the challenges described above.
The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art, or suggestions of the prior art, by inclusion in this section.